Meet Quentin Lacointa: mentor @SWUtrecht 2015

When you see Quentin Lacointa, you think “oh, this is the most modest guy I’ve met”. But only until he pulls out if his sleeve a series of mesmerising tips and tools on growth hacking.

Quentin is the master of masters in International Management and Corporate Finance.

Meet our mentor Quentin

Since he was a student, Quentin has been looking for new initiatives and projects. At the age of 18, he started working on the website that listed places to party in Toulouse. He even went to Australia to see koalas and work on SAP web marketing solutions.

“In the end, I found out that pure web marketing was boring. The marketing campaign usually moves very fast, but your position as a web marketer doesn’t. I even didn’t know what exactly developers or users were doing, I had no clue what the cost-per-click was. But I knew that I am good in data and marketing, and that’s how I ended up in becoming a growth hacker which combines different traits of design, programming, analytics, storytelling, copywriting, statistics, basically everything.”

Quentin is also a co-founder of the french startup community but has recently joined the Growth Tribe, an academy based in Amsterdam that provides intensive workshops and training on growth hacking. Check his experience and excitement about Growth Tribe and more in the video interview below.

“Dutch startups are more international than the french. It’s easier for foreigners here in the Netherlands because you can work only using English, and the paperwork can be done in one day! It’s also more difficult to get in and out in the French market while the Dutch market moves very fast. I’m pretty sure that Amsterdam will become the next Berlin soon.”

Quentin’s advice to expats that want to step into the Dutch startup ecosystem is, first of all, follow what kind of startups are accepted to the Dutch accelerators, Rockstart and Startupbootcamp. Even though Dutch people are very social, their startup community is still quite closed, so you need to go to a themed meetup and/or organise one yourself.

To the question, what is the first step that anyone who launches a startup need to do, Quentin immediately response is:

“Definitely read The Mom Test!!! Usually what happens is that people think they have a great idea, but if they don’t get enough of creative feedback before they seriously consider to launch it, the idea goes down the drain eventually. You need to talk to people. Discover where your target audience hangs out, ask very specific and well-thought questions. You don’t need to tell them that you have an idea or you want to launch a product, just start asking questions. Also, check if your audience is B2B or B2C. If it’s the later, Startup Weekend is one of the best places to test it.”

Also, due to a mass load of articles on the Internet, Quentin suggest to learn speed reading (for which he has taken a course recently himself) and follow the local influencers like David Arnoux.